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Sunday, June 16, 2013

Teaching Intraverbals: How & When?

Intraverbal- A verbal operant first defined by BF
Skinner in his book “Verbal Behavior”. An intraverbal is a type of language
that involves explaining, discussing, or describing an item or situation that
is not present, or not currently happening. Examples include: Answering the
question “How old are you”, filling in the missing words “At the zoo last
month, we saw some _____, _______, and a ______”, or singing songs “Sing the
alphabet song”.

Intraverbals
can often be quite challenging and time consuming programs to teach during
ABA therapy. Even for therapists or parents who don’t know the verbal operants and aren’t sure what an “intraverbal” is, they usually want their child/client to perform a
variety of intraverbal skills.

Common
questions/complaints I get when a child lacks an intraverbal repertoire
include:

“She
only uses language to ask for things, she isn’t conversational”

“He
can greet his teacher by name every morning when I take him to school, but if I
just randomly ask him: What’s your
teachers name? he won’t say anything”

“He
can sing the entire Barney song (“I love you”) while watching the videos, but
if I ask him to sing it during bath time he just looks at me”

“She
doesn’t participate when we play The Question Game during dinner. We all take
turns answering questions like “Name a pink animal”, “Sing your favorite song”,
and “What should we have for dessert”. I know she’s verbal, why does she refuse
to answer these questions?”

Teaching a
child to mand (request) is extremely important, particularly when beginning an
ABA program, because manding is how the child can communicate wants and needs
to the outside world.

Unfortunately,
in some ABA programs a child can get stuck at only using language to mand or
tact (label). This would look like a child who only communicates with others to
request ("popcorn please") or
to label ("red car"). The child
might spend their entire day manding and tacting, and to the parents and
therapists there is no problem! The child is talking and communicating…clearly
the ABA was effective. Eventually someone notices that when asked direct
questions, the child won’t respond. Or when placed with peers, the child
wanders away or just stares blankly at them. At that point, either the staff
and family begin to think the ABA “isn’t working”, or the child is blamed for being
difficult or stubborn and just choosing not to talk.

An ABA program
should teach all components of language, not just the ability to request
or label. Most conversation consists of a variety of intraverbals,
and if you want your child/client to move past talking and really begin communicating,
then intraverbals are the way to teach that.

So how and when do you
teach intraverbals?

-Firstly,
intraverbals are a verbal skill. It would be
inappropriate to add intraverbal programs to the curriculum of a nonverbal child.
If you are able to teach the child language, then first work on building
mands and tacts before introducing intraverbals.

-Strong
receptive skills can also help a child learn intraverbals, because you can
begin teaching by having the child receptively describe an item (Give me the one that is a utensil), and
then you can remove the tangible item and present the demand as an intraverbal
(Name a utensil). Similarly, you can
also transfer as mand or tact to an intraverbal response by first teaching the
target response as a mand or tact with the item present, and then removing the
item and teaching the target response as an intraverbal. You can bring the
tangible item back out as a prompt, but you would then need to fade that
prompt in order for the target response to be a true intraverbal. I tell this
to therapists all the time: If you are holding up a card or object, you are not
teaching an intraverbal.

-Be
sure to minimize student error. I would suggest using Errorless Teaching, where the child is not allowed to practice making errors. The
therapist is quick to provide full prompts, and then fade out those prompts
systematically. Especially with intraverbal programs, it isn’t uncommon to see
all sorts of lovely escape behaviors (including aggression) to get the
therapist to back off. This can happen even with the most calm, sweet, “Peace & Love” type of client. Intraverbals are hard. Rote responding,
studying the room, or looking at the therapists face will not reveal the answer
to an intraverbal question. Understand the difficulty of intraverbal questions
before you begin teaching them, and be prepared that you may need to use new
and varied reinforcers, and provide lots of prompts to help the child contact
success and stay motivated.

-Here
are a few Do Nots: Do not begin teaching intraverbals too early, or at too high of a difficulty level. Do not completely avoid teaching intraverbals ...they're the building blocks of conversation. Do not begin teaching
intraverbals until echolalia is under control. Otherwise, the child will just
repeat your question or statement, and become frustrated when that isn’t the
right answer. Do not reinforce
escape behaviors that pop up during intraverbal programs.

-The
simplest types of intraverbals are usually songs, or fill- ins. This would
include things like: “Ready, set, (go)”, “1, 2, (3)”, “A cow says (moo)”, “I love (you)”. You may be saying to yourself: Oh, my child already exhibits some of these
fill -ins or my child can sing songs. That must mean they’re ready for intraverbal programs! Not necessarily.
With Autism, it is common that skills can present in a splintered fashion (the
child can count up to 100 objects, but can’t rote count to 5 ). So this is why careful
assessment of the child as well as looking closely at their programs is
necessary before teaching intraverbals. When in doubt, seek the help of a qualified BCBA.

*Quick Tip:

Here is a list
of some advanced intraverbal goals. Depending on the needs
of your child/client, some, all, or none of these programs could be added into
your current ABA program. Start simply... build up to complex:

10
comments:

What a great post! I have been working as an ABA therapist for about nine months and this addresses so many questions I have had. I've yet to come across a strong ABA therapist community online, so many many thanks :)

Great info! I love the simplistic way you have broken everything down. As an individual new to ABA, I was worried that I wouldn't be able to comprehend the material and they way you have written about intraverbals gives me hope again lol. Thanks!

Sure, what I am referring to in the post is a transfer trial. To run a transfer trial you present the mand or tact trial, allow the learner to respond, then remove the stimuli and present the intraverbal trial. That might look something like holding up a flashcard and saying "What's this?" and the learner says "Bed". Then you can run a transfer trial by removing the flashcard and saying "You sleep in a.....". If the learner does not automatically respond you hold up the flashcard again to prompt the response of "Bed". So you are moving the learner from being able to label a flashcard of a bed, to also being able to identify the function of a bed.